She tried to walk past him through the door, but he did not budge. She came to an abrupt halt just under his downturned face.
“Move,” she commanded.
His expression hardened. “Servant or no, I believe the polite thing to say is ‘excuse me.’ ”
Any hint of mischief or teasing on his part would have earned him a severe tongue-lashing. But his expression was serious.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Both an MP and a chimney sweep deserve your polite civility. And so do I.”
Her nostrils flared. Even her grandfather never upbraided her in such a manner. “Stand aside, Mr. Marshall.”
“Stand aside, please.”
She had half a mind to ram her way through the wall of muscle in the doorway. But she knew that if she touched him anywhere on his naked flesh, she would crumble all over again.
“I’m not in a playful mood.”
“Nor am I. Address me with common courtesy, and I shall treat you with the same.”
She stared up into his face, her face heating with contained anger. “Very well,” she said through clenched teeth. “Stand aside, please.”
A civil smile graced his face. He moved away from the doorway and let her pass.
She turned to face him and sank into a deep curtsy. “Now if my master would graciously condescend to following one such as I, I will gladly show him to the art room.”
He leaned his back against the doorjamb and crossed his arms. “Sarcasm is just as rude as brusqueness. But I shall give you the benefit of taking your words at face value.”
Athena straightened. It was like being with a schoolmaster. She hitched up her skirt and led him upstairs to the lecture room.
From behind the door, she could hear the ladies chattering. She knocked twice and breezed in.
The room had been arranged according to her specifications. A semicircle of easels had been positioned in front of a platform, upon which a single ottoman stood. The room was alive with the familiar, sharp smell of charcoal, and Athena felt once again in control.
“Ladies, class is about to begin. Please take your seats behind your easels. All smocks on? Good. Now, remember what I’ve told you. Mr. Marshall, you may come in.”
Marshall took a step into the room, and twelve women gasped. Wide-eyed and slack-jawed, they took in a quick look before retreating behind their sketchpads to giggle nervously with one another.
“Ladies, please control yourselves. Show some decorum. Mr. Marshall, please have a seat on the ottoman.”
In front of the platform were two pedestal candelabra casting light upon the cushioned seat. Uncomfortably, Marshall padded along the carpeted floor, and stepped up onto the platform. He puzzled over how to sit down on the low upholstered bench without revealing what was underneath his towel. Only one thing was to be done. He unhooked the towel and held it to his groin as he crouched onto the seat.
The sight of his naked hips made a woman gasp audibly. Athena walked along the semicircle of easels until she found the guilty party.
“Lady Katherine! Control yourself. This is a man, not a circus freak.” But the heavy lady could not overcome her shock. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Mr. Marshall, would you mind closing your eyes?”
He frowned at her. “Close my eyes?”
“Just for a moment. Please,” she added meaningfully.
He sighed, and shut his eyes.
“Now, ladies—Alice, stop snickering—take a good, long look at your model. He can’t see you, so don’t be bashful. This is what a man looks like with no clothes on. Although men vary greatly in size and build, and your model here is physically among the finer specimens of males, all men are equipped alike. The reason I hired a model for you is twofold. Artistically, we are going to perfect our techniques of shading contours and conveying textures, and a human body has many curves and textures that we can practice with. But I also wanted you to see what a man’s body is like. Your parents and protectors would have you go to your wedding night in complete ignorance of what to expect your husband’s body to look like. This puts you at a disadvantage, since his more worldly education has already taught him what a woman’s body feels like, let alone looks like. Consequently, many young brides are so astonished by the overwhelming experience of seeing a man nude for the first time that they seldom enjoy the act of intimacy. This shall be your primer. See what you can expect in your marriage bed. Permit your visual senses to feel the hard curve of his muscled shoulders and the wooliness of his body hair. Learn the ridges of the grooves and sinews, and the sharper angularity of a man’s form. Let your eyes drink their fill of this man’s body, and then translate that image to the paper.”
Athena looked around at the ladies’ faces. The giddiness had vanished. Now they were able to look at the body with a more analytical and probing eye. She smiled inwardly. This exercise had let the girls take a great leap forward in becoming confident and self-assured women.
“There isn’t enough time to draw the whole of your model, so tonight, you will focus on one feature of his body and sketch it. You may begin now.”
Athena walked up to him. “Mr. Marshall?”
He opened his eyes and looked up at Athena. “That was a very moving speech. This class of yours is certainly very interesting.”
“It’s about to become more interesting. Please remove the towel.”
EIGHT
Marshall’s eyes darted around the room nervously. “In front of all these women?”
Athena found she enjoyed seeing him squirm. “That cocksure attitude of yours melted awfully quickly.”
His eyes sparked blue fire. “Miss McAllister, are you sure this is wise? These ladies are innocents.”
“They are all elder of twenty-five. Old enough to be married, and therefore old enough for this.”
“Inexperienced, then.”
“Not after tonight.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t wish to be responsible for corrupting these ladies.”
“It is an attitude that does you credit, but you’re not corrupting anyone. That is the point of this exercise. Ignorance of a thing increases the fear of it. When these ladies finally do see a fully naked man—on their wedding night, presumably—they will be in the midst of a situation over which they will have little control. This is an environment in which they can feel safe. Safe to look, free to enjoy, without the threat of any impending violation.”
His sandy brown eyebrows drew together. “Violation? Is that what you think of lovemaking?”
Athena shrugged. “It is a fact. For some of these girls, whose marriages will be arranged to a complete stranger, it is the way they will feel about their marriage bed.”
A guilty expression came over his face as his thoughts turned to Justine. He cast a concerned glance across the ladies’ expectant faces. “I hadn’t . . . quite considered it . . . from that point of view.”
“Perhaps you should. Ask them yourself.” Athena turned around. “Lady Penelope, you once described to me the man that your father intended for you to wed.”
Lady Penelope, a woman of tepid beauty but possessed of a lovely figure, shuddered. “Lord Chesley. Oh, he was awful. He was old and gouty, and he spat when he talked. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. One time, I saw him flog his horse just because she went lame. The poor beast bled torrents, and even I couldn’t stop him from hitting her. One night at a ball, he began to kiss me. I tried to be accommodating, really I did. But no matter how many nice things he whispered in my ear, all I heard was the sound of his horse screaming.”
Athena returned her attention to Marshall. “When she refused to accept the gentleman’s offer of marriage, her father expelled her from the house without a penny to her name. Now she lives on her uncle’s modest estate in Dorset, forced into spinsterhood by her father until she relents and marries Lord Chesley. It’s the height of injustice that a woman as bright and caring as Lady Penelope is given in marriage to one such as h
e. That’s why her uncle asked her to come here . . . to break down her resistance and get her to accept the betrothal. And each of these ladies has her own story to tell. Quite frankly, I don’t know if I can rescue them from a loveless marriage. But the least I can do is ease their way through a ghastly nuptial experience.”
Marshall hung his head to think how Justine must have felt when faced with a marriage prospect of his choosing. He knew she didn’t like Herbert Stanton, but he had forced her hand anyway. How poor Justine must have tried to make the most of a bad situation by learning how to endure marriage to Stanton rather than enjoy it.
Marshall sighed deeply. He didn’t know if it was guilt or compassion that spurred him to it, but he lifted the towel and let it drop to the floor.
His nakedness was a blur as Athena spun around and stepped off the platform. Despite her admonishments to her students, Athena could not help feeling a bit flustered herself. “Ladies, if you would, avail yourself of the sight of this obliging model. We will discuss the topics of sensuality and lovemaking in depth next week. For now, feel free to appreciate a man’s form in its natural state.”
A couple of the women giggled furtively, their smiling mouths hidden behind their nervous hands. Athena walked around the room, watching the faces of her students quickly transform from a look of bashful tension to timorous curiosity. They began to gaze unabashedly, their heads tilted to one side in thoughtful study. Within moments, all were sketching furiously.
Athena was also eager to gaze upon him. But each time she glanced up at his platform, she found him looking straight at her. Any hint of embarrassment at his own nudity had been replaced by a challenge that seemed spoken only to her. His eyes followed her everywhere, as if she were the most important thing in the room. Consequently, she felt far too self-conscious to look at his body for any length of time. His confident, teasing smile seemed to hide some secret knowledge, and it made her feel as if she were the one with no clothes on.
Athena walked behind the semicircle of easels, offering guidance and correcting her students’ techniques. Under the guise of the art teacher, Athena found she could study his nudity without her face coloring. After bending over Miss Drummond’s moving pencil, Athena finally satisfied her curiosity. She stole a long look at the place between Mr. Marshall’s legs.
This part of him was wholly unlike the Greek statues she was familiar with. Those were smooth and polished, and showed miniaturized, aesthetic representations of the male sex. But the man on the platform had a nest of light brown hair between his legs and a thick tube of muscle that grew from it. The size of the sex was particularly surprising, and she marveled at the fact that such a substantial organ could be accommodated by a woman’s small opening. For the thousandth time, she wondered what such a thing would feel like inside of her. Soon she became conscious of a hushed erotic whisper inside, inaudible to anyone but her. Later, perhaps, she would give it full voice. But for now, she cradled the sensation, and secreted it away like a stolen sweet.
He was a beautiful man, no doubt about that. Handsome in face and form, a perfect artist’s model. There were points of interest all over his body. Curve upon curve of muscle flowed down his arms. His golden-brown skin seemed to absorb the candlelight rather than reflect it, but a dusting of blond hair gave his shins and forearms a soft shimmer. The ridges of muscle on his abdomen folded at his narrow waist. One long thigh was partially obscured as he leaned over it, his elbow resting on his left knee. But the other showed clearly just how long his lap was.
Her hands itched to sketch him. She went to a side table and began to sharpen a pencil with a blade.
“I’m beginning to feel a slight draft,” he said.
She glanced up at him. “No doubt it has something to do with the fact that you have no clothes on.”
He rolled his eyes. “Isn’t there a fireplace behind me? A fire might make me more comfortable.”
“Question asked, question answered.” Athena picked up her sketchbook and her pencil and retreated to the rear of the room. Here, behind the platform, she could see Marshall from the back, but he could not see her.
“That’s quite all right, Miss McAllister. Your tenderness alone warms me.”
“Well, I mean really. Why a man would complain about being naked in a room full of women absolutely defeats me.”
“You’d sing a different tune if you had to change places with me.”
“Now there’s a silly idea. A naked artist painting a clothed model.”
He snickered. “Perish the thought. The whole fabric of society would become unstitched.”
Athena smiled surreptitiously at his joke as she leaned against a table. There was great freedom from her vantage point; here, she could scrutinize him without feeling the weight of his perspicacious stare. She cocked her head to one side, tracing the contours of his back with her gaze, and let the pencil fly over the blank paper.
In no time, the white paper showed an outline of his masculine body. She began to sketch the details of his form: the waves of his blond hair, the expanse of his wide shoulders, the tapering of his narrow waist, the spread of his heavily muscled legs. There was a texture to his skin, not smooth like silk, but rough like sketch paper. And then there were those scars on his back . . . long, jagged lines that marred the beauty of his body.
“How did you get those scars?”
He chuckled. “Such fatal curiosity.”
“Oh, very well, then. Don’t tell me.” She meant to come off as flippant, but instead sounded petulant.
“It’s almost a joy keeping a secret from you.”
She pursed her lips as she darkened the contours of his back. “I can only presume you were stabbed in the back by women you kept secrets from.”
He turned around and looked at her, the muted light giving his features a lethal edge. “Weren’t you taught that it’s unseemly to comment on a person’s deformities?”
She felt her face go all red again, but put forth an air of displeasure. “Mr. Marshall, please retain your pose. If you remain still and don’t move, perhaps our relationship will be less painful than I find it at present.”
“As you wish,” he said, resuming his pose, a wicked grin spread across his face. “May I have leave to speak just once more?”
She sighed heavily. “I shudder to grant it without a due sense of alarm.”
“I’ll tell you about the scars if you tell me what meaning is behind the sinister elements in your paintings in the sitting room below.”
Her mind turned to those paintings. The locked treasure chest, the masks, the dark woods. Those symbols were emblematic of her own secret pain—the inaccessibility of love, the inscrutability of men, her own loneliness. She could never confess those intimate details with someone like him. “Then I suppose we shall never discover each other’s secrets.”
“Pity. I should have liked to become more intimately acquainted with you.”
It was impossible to ignore the double entendre, and it made her feel a bit giddy.
His left shoulder was next, and her pencil delineated the hard lines. She appreciated the way the light disappeared under the curve of muscle and used her fourth finger to blend the graphite into a soft shadow.
Gradually, her mind began to drift. As her fingertips smoothed over the contour of the muscles on his shoulder and back, she began to imagine the feel of his skin against her hands. Softly, her fingers brushed the long line down his spine, wondering what it would look like in movement over her own body. She traced a line across his back to his right shoulder, imagining it braced beside her head as he positioned himself over her. Her darkened fingertips smudged the shadow down his right thigh, absently wondering what such a thing would feel like against the soft inside of her own thighs. Pensively, her fingers warmed the hard planes of his buttocks. They were firm and square, calling forth images of it rising and thrusting into her own wetness, again and again and again . . .
“I said, ‘Excuse me.’ ”
&nb
sp; The interrupted pleasure was almost painful as the heated vision vanished into cold reality. She looked up at the source of the voice. Marshall had turned in his seat to peer straight at her. “It’s ten o’clock. Time’s up.”
It took her several moments to reconnect with her surroundings. “Oh.” She set the sketchbook facedown on the table. “Of course.” She stood up on unsteady legs. “Ladies, have you all finished?”
“Yes, Miss McAllister,” they answered in unison.
“Very well, then. You may leave the smocks here on the table and retire for the night. Alice, please ask Gert to bring up Mr. Marshall’s clothes.”
Marshall stood up and stretched. Athena watched in fascination as his magnificent naked body extended to its full length.
“That was rather more grueling than I expected,” he said, fastening the towel around his hips.
She busied herself collecting and folding smocks. “Yes,” she droned. “Sitting idly must be absolutely exhausting work for you.”
He shook his head. “I wish your mouth would sit idly.” His feet pounded on the wooden floorboards as he stepped off the platform. He padded around her to get a look at the sketchpads.
Marshall moved slowly from one canvas to the next, regarding each one thoughtfully. With his arms crossed in front of him and a contemplative look on his face, he looked as if he were walking along the Prints and Drawings Room at the British Museum instead of a ladies’ academy lecture hall covered in nothing but a towel. “This is very interesting.”
“What is?”
“The artists’ choices of subject.”
“What do you mean?” She looked at each drawing, stopping where he did. “There’s nothing untoward in these sketches.”
“That’s what I mean. Look here,” he said, moving back along the semicircle of easels. “This one drew my hand, and she did a damn fine job of it. This one drew my foot . . . even though it looks more like a sea lion’s flipper than a human foot. This one did my head. That one did my chest. Sitting up there naked as a jaybird, I was sure I’d find twelve interpretations of the sight of my arbor vitae.”
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